Episode 11: Matthew Hollis on "The Seafarer"

A lit-hub radio podcast. Come lean in for this song of myself, bear with me these tides of telling, days without dawn, nights of no end, the oceans abturning. I cannot calm the surge within, I cannot stop the wave from breaking. Lost to the lookout, watchful at the prow, my keel hands shaking in this spill, driven too much toward rocks. You know, if you're in a warm place, that's no good. I want you to clear that thought out of your head. I want you to be thinking about a rough wintery sea where the horses are frozen and the chains lock together with ice, where even to keep yourself alive is to keep in circulation or to keep some way out of this biting north wind, and you're in a storm, you're in a storm that is going to threaten to dash you on the rocks. And while you're out there, you're a catching glimpses of a land off in the distance, where you imagine that there are people safe, and people who are enjoying the vineyards of life love, safety, the security of their chief, whereas the seafar we learn is in a different condition, a condition that is described as "recha," "recha," which is an old Anglo-Saxon word, meaning exile or the one driven out. This is Donovan Hone from Lappams Quarterly, and this is The World in Time. This episode of The World in Time is sponsored by the New York Review of Books. This fall joined Daniel Mendelssohn, the reviews editor at large, and Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review Books Classics Series, for two new online seminars. Mr. Mendelssohn on tragic heroines featuring works by Homer, Sophocles, Flowbear, and Tennessee Williams, and Mr. Frank on political novels by Anthony Trullop, Joseph Conrad, Ursula Kay Laguin, and others. Seminars, to be conducted on Zoom, meet weekly, and offer participants the opportunity to discuss seminal texts with these award-winning critics while meeting fellow literature lovers from around the world. To reserve your place, visit nybooks.com/lqpodcast, or email us at [email protected]. On this episode of The World in Time, we're going to leap a millennium into the past, and go sailing on the wintered waste, the hammer sung C, aboard a ship cloaked in ice. We're going to, in other words, spend the whole episode with the 10th century Anglo-Saxon poem The Sea Faireer, and we're going to spend most of this episode without poems, most recent translator, Matthew Hollis, who will take us into the world as well as the language of this ancient poem of exile and wandering that is at once an outward and an inward voyage. How is it, the speaker in the Hollis translation asks? How is it that the heart pulls harder, draws me deeper onto towering seas, commands me out to salt break, to go further in, as I go further out? Back in 2013, in the Sea issue of Lappams Quarterly, we excerpted a different translation of The Sea Faireer, the won by Kevin Crossley Holland, originally published in his 2009 Oxford University Press Anthology of Anglo-Saxon Texts, The Anglo-Saxon World. Back then, my colleague, Aiden Flax Clark, then the host of the Lappams Quarterly podcast, asked Lewis Lappam to record some of the readings from the Sea issue, to accompany its publication, and Lewis's reading of The Sea Faireer's opening section, the first several dozen lines, happens to be among the recordings that Aiden Flax Clark made, so that readers unacquainted with this Anglo-Saxon voyage of a poem have some idea of what Matthew Hollis and I are talking about, we're going to start by hearing Lewis Lappam's reading from the Crossley Holland translation. But then, aside from a brief interruption by the voice of Ezra Pound, we're going to spend the rest of the episode with Matthew Hollis and his wonderful new translation illustrated by photographer Norman McBeath and published in the UK last year by Hazel Press. Here's Aiden Flax Clark, introducing the beginning of The Sea Faireer as read by Lewis H. Lappam in 2013. The Sea Faireer is probably the best-known Old English poem after Beowulf, it's the account of a sailor, told by a sailor, describing on the one hand the torturous hard-worn life of the man at sea, and on the other his inescapable desire to always get back out on the water. The poem was found in a manuscript that's called the Exeter Book, it's the largest collection of Old English poetry and existence. In fact, if you've read an Old English poem that's not Beowulf, chances are it came from the Exeter Book. Okay, here's Lewis with our last reading, The Sea Faireer. Circa 850, England, Sailor's Song. I can sing a true song about myself, tell of my travels, how in days of tribulation I often endure at a time of hardship. How I have harbored bitter sorrow in my heart and often learn that ships are homes of sadness. Wild were the waves when I often took my turn. The arduous night watch, standing at the prow while a boat tossed near the rocks. My feet were afflicted by cold, fettered in frost, frozen chains. There I sighed out the sorrows, seething round my heart, a hunger within tore at the mind of this seawary man. He who lives most prosperously on land does not understand how I care worn and cut off from my kinsmen, have as an exile endure to winter on the ICC. Hung round with ice-colds, hail showers flew. I heard nothing there but the sea booming, the ice-cold wave at times the song of the swan. The cry of the gannet was all my gladness, the call of the curlue, not the laughter of men. The mulling gall, not the sweetness of meat, there storms beat the rocky cliffs. The icy feathered turn answered them, and often the eagle, do we winged, screeched overhead. No protector to console the cheerless heart. Wherefore he who is used to the comforts of life and proud and flushed with wine, suffers little hardship living in the city. We'll scarcely believe how I, weary, have had to make the ocean pass my home. The night shadow grew long, it snowed from the north, frost fettered the earth, hail fell on the ground, cold as to brain. But now my blood is stirred that I should make trial of the mountainous streams, the tossing salt waves. My heart's longings always urge me to undertake a journey to visit the country of a foreign people far across the sea. On earth there is no man so self-assured, so generous with his gifts or so bold in his youth. So daring in his deeds are with such a gracious lord that he harbors no fears about his seafaring as to what the Lord will ordain for him. He thinks not of the harp, nor of receiving rings, nor of rapture in a woman, nor of worldly joy, nor of anything but the rolling of the waves. The seafare will always feel longings. The groves burst with blossom, towns become fair, meadows grow green, the world revives. All these things urge the heart of the eager man to set out on a journey, e who means to travel far over the ocean paths. And the cuckoo, too, harbagnar summer, sings in a mournful voice, boating bitter sorrow to the heart. The prosperous man knows not what some men endure, who tread the paths of exile to the end of the world. Wherefore my heart leaps within me, my mind roams with the waves over the waves domain. It wanders far and wide across the face of the earth, returns again to me eager and unsatisfied. The solitary bird screams irresistible, purges the heart to the wail's way over the stretch of the seas. That was Lewis Lappam reading the first several dozen lines of Kevin Crossley Holland's translation of the seafarer, back in 2013. Since he began translating Anglo-Saxon twenty years ago, the seafarer, Matthew Hollis writes in the introduction to his new translation, has held a place in my regard so special that I vowed not to attempt it until I had enough experience of craft and life to make something of its depths. But finally, made Hollis decide to make the attempt, a photograph by the photographer Norman McBeath of a bow-wave, a bow-wave breaking Hollis writes fiercely on its dark self, its grained minutiae giving the appearance of a beast rising from below, or some evolving form temporarily frozen at the surface by the camera lens. McBeath's photograph made Hollis think at once of the seafarer. The photographer and the translator decided to collaborate. McBeath's photographs of the sea do not illustrate Hollis's new translation exactly. They accompany it. It is almost if they too are a kind of translation. They translate the Anglo-Saxon poem, not into contemporary English, but into the medium of photography. You can see the photograph of a bow-wave that first inspired Hollis on our website, lapimscordily.org. We're publishing it there along with the first several dozen lines of the seafarer. The same lines you just heard Lewis Lapham read, but this time in Hollis's new translation. As you can hear, Matthew Hollis reading his new translation in its entirety on his SoundCloud, a link to which we'll be adding to the show notes. A few times during our conversation when Matthew and I are talking about particular passages, we've sampled the relevant audio from that SoundCloud reading of the poem. And on one occasion, we've sampled the audio of Ezra Pound, reading the opening lines from his own famous translation. Matthew Hollis is a poet, editor, and biographer, the author most recently of Earthhouse, a collection of poems published in 2023, and The Wasteland, a biography of a poem published in 2022. And he is co-editor of the poems of Shemus Haney, which will be published by FSG this November. Here's my conversation with Matthew Hollis. Welcome Matthew Hollis to the world in time. Thank you, Donovan. Pleasure to be with you. So you're a poet and a scholar of poetry and you're a translator. I felt a hidden question mark at the end of the first one. Well you are a poet. I was reading some of your own work. You come to the art of translation with the scholarly skills of a literary scholar, but you but also perhaps the ear of a poet. I thank you. I come from poetry first. That's absolutely right, Donovan. And I think my engagement with translation has always been the same instinct that a poet has, which is that a piece of writing in poetry and translation is an act of community. And I think that's something we might find as I'm talking a little bit about, especially with translation. And Anglo-Saxon translation in particular. Well I grew up and come from a part of England, which is called East Anglia. And East Angles were the Anglo-Saxons who settled from Northern Europe in the fifth century. And even around me growing up, a lot of that vocabulary could still be heard on the ear, particularly in the dialect. It's in the names of animals. It's in the place names, Donovan, where I grew up very clearly, a place that has ham or in in the title can be identified as an Anglo-Saxon settlement, whereas Thorpe and Bi will tell you that this was a Viking settlement. So Lappam's quarterly is an Anglo-Saxon settlement, I'm just realising. Well there you go, exactly right. So it came close to me from the start, and though I have translated with European poets and poets from across the world, when I translate anonymously, it's usually to Anglo-Saxon poetry that I turn. And I think the seafarer is well into my run of this, some 20 years in, of translating Anglo-Saxon verse. I have an anthology of English poetry that I've been carrying around with me since my early 20s that opens with the Coo-Coo song. But what are the greatest hits of Anglo-Saxon poetry? We've got things like the Coo-Coo song, these better lyric, Beowulf. Beowulf is the name of my cat. So that may tell you something about this seriousness that Anglo-Saxon poetry holds in this household. And so, I mean just to say a little bit about that, then Anglo-Saxon is this language that arrives in Britain, or what was Briton, in a Britonic place, the Celtic place in the 5th century, and it spreads across the south part of England and up into the north. And it becomes the dominant language as it moves west across the country until the Danes invade and Daimler operates in a half of the country in the 9th century. So in that time, which is known peculiarly in ways, the Dark Ages, Anglo-Saxon verse starts to circulate. And as you've already mentioned, the most famous example of this is the Great Beowulf poem, which in many regards is the National poem of Britain. And Beowulf may be composed as early as 440 or 450, we're not quite sure. Some scholars think it's later than that. The poem we're going to talk about today, see fair is certainly later than that, was probably orally composed round about the year 900 or the year 950. But all of these poems have in common the fact that for the first decades, if not hundreds of years of their life, they only existed by the ear. They were spoken, they were often accompanied with a lyre, and they were not written down until very much later, sometime in the 11th century. So is this akin to the way that we know that the Homeric epics would have been performed by singers with a lyre in a kind of ceremonial or social occasion, almost like a theatrical event? Is it something similar with the way Beowulf would have been performed? Absolutely, and I think you said something very important there about the collective response and engagement with poetry, because I think often these days we identify a poem with a poet and then we become interested in the poet's life, whether that brings some shade or coloration on the poem itself. But we're talking about an era where we often couldn't identify a poet or a single poet, and there may have been a collection of poets. And even if there wasn't, we then have the issue of the fact that sometimes this poem is passed down hundreds of years, or even in the case, essentially with hundreds of thousands of years, and presumably, rather like a Chinese whisper, things get altered along the way. And yet, and yet, somehow we are left with this extraordinary craft at the sense of purpose and direction that has allowed some of these texts to survive for the age that they have. Okay, so we have this poem, The Seafarer, and it's a bit mysterious this poem, later than, later than Beowulf. We think written down in what year? We think written down in the early 1000s, and to say a little bit about that, to make the composition of this poem even more perplexing and head scratching, we know that the person that wrote it down was not the person that wrote or really composed the poem. And not only that, we know that the person or persons that wrote it down changed the poem as well, and that's not an uncommon occurrence with Anglo-Saxon poetry, which much of it was secular, and much of it was very engaged in the land and the spirit land. Some of it was even pagan, we might call it, and what tends to happen was that the first people that wrote it down were the Christian clerics, and they saw in these texts not only important history, but more like a purpose or a vehicle or a manifesto in which their own vision of importance in that moment in that time could also be conducted. So in the case of the seafarer, we appear to have not one poem, but two, and possibly not two, but three, and possibly not three, but four, because we appear to have a poem as a first 32 lines or so written by poet A. And next 32 lines or so possibly written by poet A, but arguably by poet B, because pop B seems to contradict what goes on in part A, and if that's not complicated enough, we get further into the poem, and we realise that yet another writer has come along and put a Christianised focus upon what A and B have been in conversation about, and not only that, there may have been more than one Christian scribe, because even in that section, the language and the style appears to change slightly. So it does beg the question, what is the seafarer? We don't know who its author was, though we can, we can surmise how it came in to be conceived, but we can say a little bit about its story, and we can say that the seafarer is an unknown sailor, set on a cold, wintry, probably North Sea. We don't know for say it never says exactly where it's set, but the likelihood is it's around the coast of Britain, and possibly East Anglia where I come from. We don't know when the poem is set, we may know where we think it's composed, and we certainly are pretty sure when it was written down when it was recorded in the Exeter book, but it doesn't ever say whether it's set in the present day or in the past. But what we do know is that it tells a story of a person on a boat, on their own, set it sea in wintry conditions. So wherever you are today, if you're in a warm place, that's no good. I want you to clear that thought out of your head. I want you to be thinking about a rough wintry sea where the horses are frozen and the chains lock together with ice, where even to keep yourself alive is to keep in circulation, or to keep some way out of this biting North wind, and you're in a storm, you're in a storm that is going to threaten to dash you on the rocks. And while you're out there, you're catching glimpses of a land off in the distance where you imagine that there are people safe, and people who are enjoying the vineyards of life, love, safety, the security of their chief, whereas the seafare we learn is in a different condition. A condition that is described as regia, which is an old Anglo and Saxon word, meaning exile, or the one driven out. That's an extremely important idea in this poem that we might talk a little bit about, because exile is a potent word in any time of history. But in Anglo Saxon times, it had a particular meaning because if you were in exile, you were outside the safety of your Lord and keeper, you were left your own devices, you were left to the elements, you were left to divining your own food and shelter and water and everything else, whereas if you were in the life within society of the local king at the time, and you pledged your loyalty to that king, you had that safety around you, you had that comfort, you had that security from outside attack, and in this poem, we appear to have somebody that has chosen not to be part of that life, or has been exile from that life and is weighing up the value of a life in exile. Reading it, I've spent some time with it, and in the poet's A section, it's an poet B section, you do feel that whoever wrote the first draft of this poem was intimately acquainted with the C, the actual, you know, there's the cries of the birds, there's, I mean, you feel you reading it, like you're transported to the ship out there in the winds, it's striking, and yet, as the poem moves on, you can feel whether it was poet A's original intention or not, that the seafaring becomes increasingly allegorical or metaphorical. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So the storm that you describe is outward and inward at the same time you come to understand, don't we? And we open in this scene where this is a sea that will take your life, this is the cruelty, this is the hard sea, and it takes an extraordinary skill and good luck to survive it. But we come quickly to realise in this poem that actually there is a different kind of allegorical turmoil within this well, and it's one of the things that makes this poem so compelling it seems to me, because it does have ideas about moral choices and it does have ideas about belonging that seem as important today as they were then, and one of the great things that strikes me with the, with the great parts of the Anglo-Saxon opus is how modern it feels or rather to put it in a different way. How timeless the cares and concerns and worries of human beings can be that some of the fears about loneliness, some of the fears about pain, some of the worries about doubt, about making the life of a good life or the life of right choosing issues that trouble us in exactly the same way or challenges in exactly the same way as they did this sailor or the voice of this speaker of this poem then. I mean, I think there was a turn with a line that's very simple, but it seemed to me also very powerful, which is simply to go further in as I go further out and that felt to me one of the hinges where the poem, where the outward journey across the ocean becomes an inward journey of spirit. I think you're exactly right, Donovan, and I think your word hinge is perfect because this poem to talk about it technically is full of extraordinary artistry and full of literary devices of hinges that move the reader from one scene to another in the poem and having describes this terrifying world of the sea and danger. And in the same way, celebrating it too, then the second part of this poem seems to then cast question on that idea thinking, well, is it the right choice? Is it the life worth living, you know, when you can see the safety of the, what Socrates would call the unexamined life, and Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living. That's a question that goes on in this poem. And the bit you talk about and the hinge going further out as I go further in is what comes next, where we begin to take a reading of the poem, perhaps not really existing on the sea at all. I mean, perhaps it does, but perhaps it's also more inward metaphorical journey as journey of the spirit, the journey of the soul, possibly between not only land and sea, but between life and whatever they author of this poem or authors considered to be an afterlife. You mentioned the book of Exeter, and I'm still interested in it in the history here. What was the book of Exeter? So that is one of the surviving manuscripts that we have of the Anglo-Saxon writings, and there are a number of them, but by far the most important is the Exeter book. And it's called the Exeter book, because that's where it's situated in Exeter Cathedral. And it doesn't contain bear wolf, but it contains many of the more important texts that were written at the time, whether it's the seafarer or day, or many of the great poems that we have with us today, the wanderer, with Seth. And it is written by a scribe in the 11th century, people are fairly confident about that. And it has survived miraculously. It has even survived fires. There are pages that have burn marks upon them as well. And in some places, the text is incomplete, but in most places it's remarkably complete. So it is perhaps the most, well not even perhaps, it is the most precious surviving collection of Anglo-Saxon writings that we still have today. So that the world that produced this book, it's a world where there would have been a lot of people farming, obviously we're on the coast, a lot of people are probably earning their living from the sea in somewhere or another. It's a feudal world, I'm imagining, there's going to be lords who provide protection in return for service. And then, but it's a Christian world. So there's a cathedral by the time that this poem is written down. And it would have been the literate part of the population would have been clergy. Exactly, exactly, and much of what was written, if not most of what was being written by the clergy was in Latin. It's unusual to have the surviving Anglo-Saxon texts, it's thrilling to have them in some ways, it's it's almost surprising to have them because it wasn't the purpose of the scribes at that moment, which was to disseminate the Christian word, which was largely being done through Latin. So that we have these is a small miracle in themselves. And their value today is astronomical to us, though interestingly, even though they were written down at that time, they didn't really become important until very much later. And in fact, the first translation that we know of of the seafarer didn't actually take place until the middle of the 19th century, even though it was known about. As far as I know, and I may be wrong, as far as I know, nothing was lost, nothing was misplaced. But there wasn't a favor and interest in middle England, in Medieval England, in Renate on England, in the Anglo-Saxon world. I mean, it was considered pagan, dangerous, dark, not a thing to explore, not especially not in the great age of enlightenment that would follow. But in the 19th century, there was a returning of attention to it, but really it was the 20th century and a little known figure that I'm sure one or two of your readers may have heard of called Ezra Pound, who actually rediscovered the poem in a popular way early in the 20th century. Because both of those moments, who are presuming that it's part of what we have come to think of as literary romanticism, there's a reclamation of the middle, and a new interest in the middle ages that accompanies that movement, but then it's going to be a different sort of reclamation for Ezra Pound and the modernists. It is striking, just thinking about the dates here, that we have this poem in the, what you used to get called, the vulgar language, or the vernacular language. This is before Dante is writing in vernacular Italian, well, before centuries before. This is before Chaucer's doing it in English. So there is something there where it perhaps makes it all the more surprising that it was ever written down at all, let alone that it survived. No, I think that's right. And we were talking a little bit about the culture that it was composed in, and you're absolutely right to say that this was a feudal time where there were small pockets of society governed by a Lord, and sometimes by a local king. This was before, mostly before, a time in which there was a single king of England, which was a later idea in Anglo-Saxon development, of course, depending slightly on when we pinpoint the seafarers' composition. So ties were different, and it was a world where your environment was shaped very immediately by tide, by wind, by the weather, and the world's spirits of the intimate relationship you had with the land around you. And so some of those thoughts about the themes that go on in this poem are very common to the way that you lived, and the choices you make about your chief and your loyalty and the life you're going to live. I know we can't know why this poem was written down, but what imagines that somebody loved the poem? Somebody had heard the poem, knew the poem, had the language of the poem in their mind to the point where they wanted to commit it to posterity by recording it. That's right, and we'll talk a little, I'm sure, about the language of the poem, but it does have some of the most extraordinary turns of Anglo-Saxon writing that any Anglo-Saxon poem does. It is such a skillful piece of composition, which is particularly odd to say given what we've described about this poem, being almost certainly multi-authored, almost certainly across an extraordinary range of times, and yet somehow it has some of the most extraordinary literary devices of its time. Somebody knew this was special, somebody knew this was a good poem. I think we should hear some, and I think maybe we started to be getting. And I think before we look at your translation in comparison to other translations, I feel in your new edition of the poem, you don't do a fully bilingual edition where we've got the Anglo-Saxon across from the modern English line by line, but you're opening section of the poem. You do give us both the Anglo-Saxon and your translation. So maybe it would be lovely to hear you read perhaps that it's presented on the page as a stanza, so just so we get the carrot transport, our listeners into the world of the poem. And then maybe you could walk us through the translation from the Anglo-Saxon into your English. How does that sound? With pleasure. I'll give you the opening section in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at some of the lines and we can talk a little bit about how to respond to the word sound and the choices we make about translation, and even if it's helpful, compare some of the paths taken by other translators of its famous opening as well. Let's start with a little bit of the sound. So I said earlier that to listen to this poem, we have to clear our head of where we are now. So let's start with a little bit of the translation from the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. So we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And then we can look at the translation from the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon. And those are the first eight lines, eight and a half lines of... It sounds magical. Thank you for transporting me into Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps the place to start is with that. First that famous, my each be may see from my each be may see from now. There are interesting things about the sonics of Anglo-Saxon that in places. It's sounding extraordinary like our modern version of English. May each can be translated as may as in the may eye and each can also be eye. So when we have may each, you could strictly translate that as may eye. So you do, in fact, get translators doing that. And as repound translates those first two words as may eye, may each. That's a verb in modern English, isn't it? And that can mean to do something or to be about something. Literally here it probably means about. Then we have me, which of course sounds like a pronoun. And indeed is a pronoun. And here we almost certainly translate it as may. And seal from seal from now. And that is a particularly interesting word to have at the front of this poem. Because seal from means self, self. And to put self right at the beginning of anonymous poem in a culture of anonymous poems too. Where we do not know the writers. There's been even probably when it was being listened to at that time. It probably wasn't being read by or recited by the person that quote unquote composed it. It was probably a traveling poet, a shop as they've been known with a musical accompaniment who are owning their keep within the king's society by a kind of traveling performance. And the way people cover songs, they're covering this poem. And go on tour and their way in this way. But there it is self. So may each be me, seal from probably means can I about myself? May each be me, seal from may I about myself? Suhtiad Regen. Suhtiad Regen. Now that's where we start to get outside of. There's nothing that obviously leaves to mind there. And that's not what we're doing. We're not just doing sonic tapestries. But Suhtiad probably remains truthful or to make something truthful. And Regen, it means to recite or to deliver a musical form or a verbal form. So what we're probably being told there is or even what we're probably being asked there is may I about myself a true lay recite or a true line or true poem recite? May I tell you something about myself in other words? Which is a long way of saying hello please to meet you. Is there a little bit of an invocation? I mean, we're not invoking the muses here. But there is a besieging not just of the audience perhaps, but of a kind of a ceremonial invitation to song or to poetry. I think there really is. And not only that, I think there's a credibility challenge and issue going on here. I think whether it's humble modest or whether it's the opposite and the self is actually something more immodest. I think there is a bit for an attention which is also a claim for an attention saying that I am going to tell you something truthful. I have the words I want you to listen up now. Pay attention here it comes. And the Anglo-Saxon line, just to linger a little bit over the poetics of the Anglo-Saxon line because it's not Shakespeare's Arabic pentameter and these lines. What's the line that you're working in that the original is in? Well, the original as we receive it is written in something that would look to our I like prose. When you look at the Exeter book and you expect to see the poem written out with its famous separations of text as you tend to understand when you look at Anglo-Saxon poetry that we'll talk about in a second. In the actual Exeter book, those don't exist. You can't really identify the perhaps there are tiny little gaps, but really it's filled out full measure across the page. It's only when you look closely and you understand the syllabics and the assenance of the and the litteration of the words that you realize there is a sort of formal measure going on there. And it's been constructed by translators from the text since as a line of two halves. And what you see in those two halves are two stresses in each half, two stressed words. Now sometimes that there is one and sometimes there is three, but by and large there are two and by and large in longer words, the first part of the word is stressed in Anglo-Saxon. And they are divided by the two stresses, so you'd have the two stresses on one side of the line and the second, the third and fourth stresses on the second part of the line. To make it slightly more dazzlingly complicated and to make the life of a translator, even harder, the Anglo-Saxon poets were fascinated with the litteration and where they broke their enliteration was over the line. So at the end of line one, you would find the litteration rolling on to line two, which is why line one finishes "Suthiad Rechen" and line two begins "Sith Has Sijin". So the rhyme as it sounds, or the sonic litteration is running across lines, which is a clever fluid motion that keeps it turning and rolling and revolving all the way through. And those are the two essential patterns of Anglo-Saxon verse that you might very well pick up in translation, depending on how a translator had responded to those challenges. But en rhyme is less important. Well, en rhyme isn't important at all because in one sense there was no en rhyme. If there is rhyme at all, it's what we've in a modern way called slant rhyme or near rhyme. And it's almost always internal. Yeah. So it seems like the rhythm is kind of incantatory. We're not necessarily doing what we would expect in a lyric poem where we're going to use the structure of stanza and chorus or refrain. And where the rhyming is linking measures of music that feels more like an incantation. Is that fair and a description? It is. It absolutely is. Although in rare occasions in Anglo-Saxon poetry, you will find refrain, but there's only two poems that act if you use a refrain. And the seafarer is the third that actually has a refraining word. When you perfectly put it on them and there's a hinge, there is a magical word in this poem, which is the word forthon, forthon. And it appears in the poem no fewer than eight times and serves as a hinge between sections all the way through. It sort of is a refrain. And fascinatingly about this word forthon, scholars can't agree on what it means. And in fact, some have felt so strongly at odds with it or that it's in defiance of any translation that they simply left it out. I put it in because as a poet, I relish and look for those structural devices in a poem that move things on and give it shape and sound and structure. So I kept it in, but you will find different translations have different responses. Sometimes they partly translate it, sometimes they totally translate it, sometimes they leave it out, sometimes they vary what it means. I've kept it to mean the same thing throughout for better or for worse. What did you settle on, Matthew, as what it should mean? Well, forthon probably means because of that. So it's a sort of time marker that it seems to suggest something like therefore. It seems to suggest that one thing may lead to another, which is a great motif in Anglo-Saxon writing. And it's something you come out a lot that things have consequences. And there's some consequences inevitable given the acts that preceded them. I translated it as "and so." And so, yes, I noticed this, right? And it's frequently kind of leading stanzas. Before we look at some of your "and so" stanzas though, I feel like I've left the listener in suspense because we've heard the Anglo-Saxon of the opening lines. And for those of us who don't speak Anglo-Saxon, let's hear your opening lines in your new translation. Okay, so these are the same eight lines in English translation. Come, lean in for this song of myself. Bear with me these tides of telling days without dawn. Nights of no end, the oceans upturning. I cannot calm the surge within. I cannot stop the wave from breaking. Lost to the lookout, watchful at prow. My keel hand shaking in this spill, driven too much toward rocks. I couldn't help. American that I am noticing that your first line ends with a song of myself, which of course I hear Whitman. And I was wondering if that was a conscious choice. I could see Whitman in some ways is very much in a tradition, a bardic tradition of incantation. So perhaps it's more that I'm hearing the echo of this poem in Whitman than the other way around. But your first line come lean in for this song of myself. How did you land on that version of that line? Unconscious, I think. But I love Whitman and you're absolutely right of course. Who could have put it better than he did. And how did I arrive at that through pain and suffering and multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple drafts, particularly at the opening? The first and the last line of a poem are always it's most important. And this is a particularly difficult one to do because because it was so troublesome in fact on of it. It was the one part of the poem that although the entire poem, which is 124 lines in the version that I put together, I translated on a crib word for word, trying to get a sense of what each word might mean individually. And then when you put them together for a sense, what they might mean collectively. I didn't very often compare those decisions to my forebearers only because I didn't want to end up sounding inadvertently like them. But for this first line, I really did. I stood on the shoulders of the masters. I took a note of every single effort that I knew of to understand this first line because it seemed to need to say and deliver so much. And so I made a list and they're quite interesting. And the first version we have of it, just four pounds, was by Benjamin Thorpe in 1842, who translated it as, "I of myself can a true tale relate. I of myself can a true tale relate." So plenty of music, but a style that we wouldn't say today. It's up there by our standards. It's high literary. And it wouldn't, by today's standard, be something like a songster or a seafare of the language they might use. Is it purposefully and perhaps artfully archaic? Is he trying to conjure the sense of this as an old poem through that elevated diction? A little bit, but also we always have to think about the times in which translator was translating. And this is the early 19th century. The influence of the Romantics is still extremely strong, of course. And he's tuning in the sensibility of what that audience might expect first to be at that stage. And now you go a little bit later than that. And when Pound takes it up, it sounds completely different. It really does. And Pound returned to this first line in the following way. He writes it as, "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon." Now that isn't easy to say. "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon?" And Pound's version does something that Thorpe's version never did. It wanted to sound out the poems as truly and strongly as possible. And when you read Pound's version, or even in some ways better, when you listen to Pound's recording, which exists and you can go out after this broadcast and listen to it if you would care to, you'll hear sounds, which are really quite extraordinary. And it has the effect of listening to somebody moving through a percussion section in an orchestra, banging and bashing and trying to create the most extraordinary co-cophony of sound that Pound hears when he reads the original text. And it's quite brilliant. "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon?" Now that isn't easy to say. "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon?" Now that isn't easy to say. "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon?" Now that isn't easy to say. "May I for my own self-songs truth reckon?" And where I often spent narrow night watch, now the ship's head, while she tossed close to cliffs, coldly afflicted my feet, where my frost benamed, chill its chains are, chafing size, cue my heart round and hunger begot mere weird mood. Yes, I mean, I was rereading the Pound yesterday, and he's definitely hitting the alliteration, right, that you described as one of the signature product devices and the original, and the next nine line is going to be, "Journey's jargon, how eye and harsh days, hardship endured oft." And he seems to be also leaning hard on monosyllables, and perhaps even on diction that is driving from the Anglo-Saxon rather than from the Latin influence in English, he's trying to approximate the music, right, of the original. He really is, and over the next hundred years we have perhaps eight or nine notable translations that adapt with time as well, until we reach Mary Jo Salter in 2011, so hundred years exactly after Pound's translation. And listen to how the music has changed when she recites her first line, and that line becomes, "I can sing my own true story." "I can sing my own true story." Compare that to Pound's, "May I of my own self-songs truth reckon?" And listen to the simplicity and the musicality of how that language is developed over the time as well. So all of these things are in your mind when you're considering how to approach, you don't want to inversely retread someone else's steps, you want to write in the language that is contemporary, even if you're adopting a language and ideas that might be well before your own time. And it's some of these things that you think about, as well as your own poets' ear for what works in good sonics, what works in good meter, and what might be memorable. I mean yours begins beautifully, Matthew, with the word, "In the imperative." Come, come lean in for this song of myself. And come is that a kind of invocation? It's an appeal. It's an invitation and invocation maybe at once, an invitation perhaps to an audience. Maybe it's also kind of an internal invitation to the poet, almost summoning the poem. It creates a kind of presence of the poem, almost a magic circle for the poem to enter. And use the word theater before Donovan, and I think that's right, and I think there is a sense in which this opening is a call to the moment. It's a plea as well. There's an attempt to say, look, I think I may have something to tell you, or we may have something to share between us. I think that's a better version of it, because I think the calm, the bidding is a community thing. It's a voice, it's a speaker among listeners. It's going to be a conversation in time, and it's going to be a sharing. It's going to be an active community. Because poetry is an extraordinary way to speak. It's not ordinary speech. It's not just a kind of functional speech that we use every day. We almost need to enter into an altered state, whether that's a ceremonial, shared state or not. It feels that that entrance into the poem has to bring that urgency that we know we're entering into a different kind of language. And I think that's particularly true of this poem and that period, where the poet to be said is an entertainer to some degree, and could be the entertainment for that night. So they need to have a suggestion of an art of the theatrical as well. And what you say about poetry, I mean, I certainly would describe it as heightened speech, but there would be many poets that would feel that actually it should be the language of the everyday as well. And that's also a challenge to a translator now, because you're not dealing with that at which of the everyday, but you are talking hopefully to people and readers that will be using the language of the day. So where on this spirit level between the two things, do you place it? Right. Beautiful. It's kind of a tension between the two, perhaps. I think we should go through the poem a bit. This is in, we're in this opening sequence, where we begin with this kind of act of storytelling. And you repeat the command, come lean in and then bear with me these tides of telling and already there there's a there's a lovely entrance of metaphor into the poem because it's we have the actual tides that we're going to be traveling. And now we've got the poem as has being pulled into its own ebb and flow of language, the tides of telling, right, that's beautiful. But then we're going to we're going to go to see here in this opening section. I mean, which I know the various scholars have tried to disentangle the different the different authors, what we can know for certain is that there seem to be different different movements that that so give it this opening movement to the speaker in the poem. There are shifts in pronoun. There are sections where the where the first person pronoun predominates as it does here. There are sections where that first person pronoun seems to draw away. We seem to be moving in the poem, not just across waters across geographies or really, I suppose oceanography is because there's not a lot of of there is a geography as well because there's a shoreline that sometimes is present. So we're moving through space in the poem. We're moving through time in the poem and it seems maybe that the speaker at the beginning of the poem is not the same that we're going to hear in later sections or is the same but is perhaps aging, right. There's movement of narrative and maybe spiritual. I think that's right and I think there has been debate to the point at which it's been suggested that there must be two different writers quarreling with one another more plausibly was a thought that this poem might offer a dialogue between an older sailor of the sea. There was something about the life to a younger sailor or even someone from the land and there was this debate about what kind of life was worth living. I think my own take of it is it's not a contradiction really. I don't think given what the poem takes us through in the dilemmas and the choices about what sort of life should be led. It's no surprise to me that that would involve an internal debate either. And if you think about a condition where you may have been at sea on your own for some time weighing up these things yourself it's not unthinkable that you would have can trusting and conflicting ideas about it. And that's what we see here so we have this fearsome storm and see coming in a driven too much towards rocks you know we know that there is a danger of death even from the outset and then we know that there is a threat of even starvation. But we're given a clue very early on that starvation is not just of the body but it's of the soul as well or it's for the whatever we think of as being somehow inside. And then very quickly the voice turns to the question about what choices do we make and it asks the question about whoever has not been in the position that the speaker has been in of lone danger. And relying on self-sufficiency without the support of community without who has whoever has not been in this situation of wintered waste as they put it will never quite understand the deeper questions about life. And that's the challenge that's laid down very early on this poem what choices should we make about life and what will their consequences be. Yes, I mean even in your fourth line fourth and fifth line we get the oceans up turning and in one sentence and then I cannot calm the surge within. So right there even in the very opening lines we're getting the storm outside and the storm storm within. And those lines in Anglo-Saxon, I mean something I mean they're quite. They're very difficult to do anything that isn't perfunctory because they almost literally whether word mean bit or sorrow of heart experienced have. Bit or sorrow of heart experienced have now that's not an easy line to do anything with. And so you can see where I'm already taking to purchase and liberties quite strongly but I'm trying to stay with the spirit of what I understand that line to be but to move it into a phrasing that we might perhaps relate to as present day readers. So of course in translation is it's this is you're not if you're doing some sort of scientific linguistics here it's creating a new poem out of an older poem. There's a desire for a kind of fidelity to something in the poem. But you have to make your own. So you arranged your the poem on the page giving into what seemed to be like each page has a stanza is and those those are those are yours. That's your choice for where to break stanzas yet. So I'm referring to them they're not they're not there in the original of these stanza breaks. No they're not and you're absolutely right to spot them and they're not I don't see them as stanzas. I do see it as a continuous poem but also I for better or worse I took the view that it's a 124 line incredibly intense poem and to have a little white space and a little breath in the poem is helpful. And so where I've organized the line breaks or the page breaks here as your spot is usually around where there is a seemingly a natural pause in the poem itself. I was grateful for it because for the exactly the reasons you said there's there's it helps me to see the organization that may be there in the original but but is perhaps a little bit obscured when it's a single column on broken. And that so and what I'm thinking of as is that's even if it's not there in the original this kind of second movement of the poem we get the idea of the sheer alone the wintered waste the sheer alone the friendless furrow. And we realize that the seafarer really is alone and then we have this these great lines about discovering the only company that the seafarer has other seabirds and we have what's probably a weepers one. We can certainly translate the word gamut and then there's you know there's some debate about which birds were actually seen but we know one of the words is translates as eagle which is probably an eagle I tried to do something. Fun with that and turn it into an osprey and that my editor said absolutely not who's a great naturalist and pointed out no it's definitely the no us please. You can't have it so I reverted to the decision that most translators make which is that that's a seagull but you have this world where only the sound of the seabirds is the only thing you hear that is relenting from the endless smash of the waves and it's haunting. Whoever settles their days on land will never know the wintered waste the sheer alone the friendless furrow. Cloaks of icicle hail flown where nothing resounds no stroke or beat but a hammer sung sea its weld of waves. Swan song sometimes a weepers whale the ganets row these for company or the curly trying out its name but nothing like the mirth of men. Girl cry where once there was mead all storm there on stone storm there on stone alone the ice tip turns answer and more than once an eagle out of ether salt winged and sodden but none like a friend. It is haunting it's it's one of those things were not blinking on which writer observed this that but if you want to create the imagination of a reader the sound of silence you can't just say it was silent you have to you have to make it audible by you know a drop of water struck a basin in the other room and now we can hear how quiet it is having the birds here is what i'm saying is makes it makes me experience the solitude much more intensely than if you were just saying I was out there in the. Sheer alone right and then their their singing is is for learn as an accompaniment to his journey. And you have this you know we have that we have the the hooper's whale and the goal crying where once there was a meet where the once there was. Need all so it's it's this it's not only that we're alone there's loss throughout this like this is somebody who did once have company was once on shore it is now alone so that is where we perhaps get the that said that sense of exile yeah. I think that's right and I think that sense of having known something to lose I think is one of the key great thoughts of this poem as well that and having that of course only comes from experience and I think that's that thread that the poem is pulling out and trying to tease out that. You have to have the experience in order to know what's valuable and you have to have had it in order to understand loss and I think that's one of the challenges that we're being asked about as a reader and respond to this work. Yeah there's grief throughout in this second movement of the poem i'm assuming this is this is you responding to something the original anger saxon but you have this line where where we do repeat not in the way that a refrain returns among stanzas but but a phrase here. Storm there on stone storm their on stone you give it to us twice yeah that was definitely translators naughty no no because it it doesn't appear twice. In the poem well then i'm fast needed to know why you made the choice i think because the sound is so strong and the impression and the relentless curl of the waves making that thread and making that sound and making that action. And also as a sort of bookmark to what we've been told in this section it seemed to sound right it seemed to suggest the to me it seemed to evoke some of the endless cycle of the situation in which the seafarer finds themselves but yes I do confess you caught me in the original it just comes once. Then I think you know as I said before you're making a new poem and I love the line that for the reasons you said there is and i'm guessing that there's some of this in the original as well i know you've written about the ocean in your own contemporary poetry from time to time but I have the sense of the music of the sea. Whether it's surf whether it's storm the movement from storm to calm is there in the language and that's one of the places where I feel that sense of you we get the idea of this of tides and of surging water but the language times needs to needs to kind of enact the motion of the sea. Well I mean we're spoken about the wonders of Anglo Saxon poetry in its original language sometimes it lays down its own challenges there are moments where it can feel more per factory than perhaps we might want to respond to his readers or perhaps as poets we might want to tease it out a little bit more and those are some of the border lines that are translated. The boggy dangerous parts that you can get yourselves embroiled in and how far do you move that interpret it but I I think the moments like that that as long as we remain true to the spirit I think we can we can move a little bit and hangar in friend of mine used to talk about this quality in translation as unfaithful beauties that was the expression that they haven't hungarian for the the poem that becomes a little bit more like a version because it doesn't in a word for word way communicate the line. But it unfaithful beauties and I think perhaps that was partially somewhere in the aim here. Well I like that quite a lot and the sea because we've been thinking in this summer at lambs quarterly about the history of the sea and the sea in this Anglo Saxon sea I wonder if it's different from say a Homeric Mediterranean sea it's certainly colder and I am thinking you know we do have a contrast we we encounter. In the Odyssey a kind of opposition between home on shore and the ocean as a kind of wilderness in the negative sense of that word a place that you're banished to that you're wandering around and how would we think about about this this Anglo Saxon city how many thoughts on that well the Anglo Saxon sea was was a great trade route I mean it was incredibly important and in that time it was faster to move around by boat than it was by land and that's a that's a concept that we've lost. It's a concept that we've lost sight of completely now at least around the islands of Britain and I suspect in the US to other not in other part of the world where people still move regularly by boat so it was the way we moved goods around it was the way in which languages were moved around it was the way in which wealth was moved around and even around the coast of Britain that's the way if you wanted to go to Winchester or you might well take it around the coast and up through the South coast and Sussex or Hampshire but and if you went to London. You would go around the coast and up through the Thames and up up that way so it's a different sort of world and it's in some ways it's the starting point if if that's where you live if you live in and it's a different experience and and if so you're not going to travel very far on foot at all and it's also worth saying that if the setting of this poem is East Anglia and there's evidence for the East Anglia in dialect of Anglo Saxon and it there's evidence for some wessex in it and there's some evidence for a setting up in the north east of England too. So it's not conclusive but if it were to be East Anglia well East Anglia was quasi in Ireland then too because it had the North Sea running all along its east coast all along its north coast on the south it was cut off by by rivers coming in and on the west it was cut off by Fennland which is still Fennland today though it's heavily been drained since Anglo Saxon times but in Anglo Saxon times it was almost impossible so even though you had this body of land it was virtually a kind of Ireland so your life was thought of that way. And your sea was your motorway it was your culture it was your contact it was your way of living it was your food source and it was obviously a kind of form of trade and power as well. Well I wonder if there's we look at the beginning and I wonder if if we want to finish by just if we want to visit other moments in the poem that are particularly rich or beautiful to you there's this famous I think rightly famous. What's the term end for in Anglo Saxon poem where we were going to take a noun and make it into a metaphor. I'm thinking of the whale road you are and I'm glad you mentioned that because we were talking a little bit about devices and Anglo Saxon poets not only used a literary superlatively but they were very interested in something that we call Kenning Kenning there and to do that was exactly as you said it was a kind of art it showed the skill of the poet but it was also a kind of game for the audience rather like in some of the ways that Shakespeare would use humor for a general audience as well. And in a Kenning you would describe a noun but you wouldn't describe it by its name you would describe it using other words and invite the readers or the listeners in that case to understand what it might be and this particular poem has perhaps the most famous of all the Kennings in all of Anglo Saxon poetry which is the word. which translates as respond to variously but usually return to something like whale way way of the whales which if you take it out of the Kenning and put it into our language means what done of them. The way of the whale seems to be the blood is the sea route is what I would assume exactly so the the whale way which some translators call the whale road and what of course the poet's meant was the sea you know the path to the whale is is what we understand the sea but it's a lovely example of of turning something understood and familiar into something strange but even to give it an even more deeper experience that the poets of the time are so good and done to perfection there. And so my mood turns with the mall escapes a moment its locker of bones to seek a threshold to the whale world out on its tide and in again. Restless and keen lone flyer soloist on the whale road beyond its chorus of waters. It's almost like a riddle for the reader for the reader or the audience the listener to solve and it becomes a very open metaphor where we're kind of participating in completing. I'm trying to think about why it's so pleasurable what of changing instead of saying this the calling it the ocean with the sea to call it the way of the whales it's beautiful and there are other techniques for example there's the wonderful word and Florga and Florga that's used in this poem which again is one of those words that translators want to agree on but it appears to suggest it could be related to the bird but more probably it's the condition of the seafarra as being. A lone flyer single flyer seems to be the translation of Ang Florga which is it's not a canning exactly but is it another way in which a parallel description is used to evoke a kind of emotion or a spirit and done with great purpose in the poem because when it does that we come to understand that here is somebody a soloist on the whale road alone flyer beyond the chorus of waters and this is the moment where the poem starts to take us into more spiritual metaphysical. In the relationship between themselves the world and perhaps their idea of God well I also like that you bring in the kind of musical metaphors into those into your rendition of those of those lines a soloist on the whale road because now it's the the poet is also perhaps a kind of soloist here at sea and there's your there's your turn there's your not the first time that you've done it you've highlighted giving it its own line and so right which is your rendition of the angle. In the rendition of the Anglo-Saxon word that I'm forgetting for some yeah for some for that one. Those guide us to the poem in your translation you set them off to guide us and here we're turning the you know frankly in lapims quarterly in the 2013 issue the sea we ended here with the lone flyer solo in the different translation but on that line about the whale road beyond the chorus of waters and that is a kind of a break in the poem right and this is one of the the sutures that people have gone back and said here we're here after this moment we're getting a voice that that sounds different. That's absolutely right Donovan and you do even find examples of the poems where the translators stop only a little beyond that poem because they think what follows next is sort of deforming the poem because it's been stuck on and it's been changing the weather vein of the prevailing wind of the poem as well. But I found it important because at that moment from this we get the as it were the pulling out and the pulling back by the speaker of the poem to consider the values of the riches one and lost on earth and to consider whether or not you can take them with you on your quote unquote journey and to consider the fact that whatever those things and losses might be is it not the case that human days will be marked all of them by the same three things either by sickness by old age or by the sword are you by violence and the same thing that falls everybody and it's at that moment that the poem begins to look more broadly at the question about what is it that we shared and what do we want to value and what do we want to carry on our time on this scene. Do we mean see on this planet is on this earth however you might respond to that idea of where the see fair is. Yeah it becomes a kind of wisdom literature doesn't it's a it's a it's in a sense it's almost like the inner voice is the kind of exterior world of the sea falls away and it's where we're now carried along by the winds and currents of the speaker's thoughts. And it seems like it almost an attempt were contemplating mortality were contemplating old age and it's the speaker is wrestling with with a sense of of purpose so you know we have the line that the only true test of any person is how they're spoken of after they're gone so we're trying to think this is really like what makes a life meaningful is where the poet is trying to get to and it's with a certain kind of agony I feel that the poet is trying to get to that wisdom. I think that's absolutely right and it goes on to say that you know few are remembered properly because their acts not good enough or they haven't looked after their friends well enough to be talked about by their friends after they've gone. And then it tells us that you know old age overtakes us and the heart grays with the hair and too many friends have gone into the ground each one born of higher hopes you know that reaches right in doesn't it I mean how which one of us has not had that feeling or that experience ourselves and then we get this quite seemingly extraordinary challenge to the understanding of the day where it says that there is no gold you know whatever decision whether we live a life of hoarding or whether we give all our worth to other people before we die either way neither one can change the judgment maybe about to befall us in this in this time and now you can very clearly feel the touch and the breath of the Christian cleric who's who's turning the screw on this poem ever so ever so neatly now. And so more lasting to me is this realm of reckoning than the brief and barren life of land. I do not believe that wealth on earth endures always and without fail one of three things will clarify how the final hour will be sickness old age or the sword will call the one marked out for time. And so the only true test of any person is how they are spoken of after they're gone that in their time they shall have acted well stood against wrongdoing railed against indifference so that those who come after speak of them and in that way ensure their name on earth extends beneath these skies and finds a life unending because it is carried among friends. And also perhaps where people feel that the speaker is older that has accumulated a litany of griefs and when he says old age overtakes us our countenance pales is this almost the speaker speaking from experience here not just having having witnessed it. I think so and I think it is an extraordinary poem of experience I mean you there's no faking this even if the reciters of the poem or the people that wrote it down didn't somebody did you know that what's in there is real. What's remarkable about is the fact that it's been kept real and truthful which is one of the key conceits and questions of the poem as well as it heads towards its great climax about thinking in which I'm calling us out for the ways that we should live and the consequences that our actions will have. And one of the reasons that that particularly interested me and I retained it in the translation though it is clearly a different voice from the seafarers. One of the features of these latter very light parts of the poem that held my attention and the reason I wanted to keep them in which not everybody did an interestingly pound didn't. He simply excluded these passages from the poem which he thought were a junk and editorial is because they seem to speak not only about an experience of your relationship to the meaning of life in a spiritual or religious sense. And it seemed also to me to offer an environmental conversation which I think is incredibly important to this poem because I think the Anglo-Saxon culture was very subtly attuned to the nuance of its physical world. A high tide and a low tide a strong wind all of these things made a fundamental immediate difference to the day and the life the success of the crops they're seafaring and everything else. And it's no wonder that you might have read spirits into these presents at the time particularly before the landscape was christianized in these places. But I think the message that can also be if you expand that message between the speaker and life and perhaps God, you can also see it as a conversation between yourself and your environment in a planetary way as well. Risk fate, the difficulty of worthy life. And I think this is a question about saying that how you look after your environment will have fundamental effect on how your life goes and how the life of others go. And I think that's one of the messages that come out of this that comes out of the christianized describes additions at the end. And I do think there is a very strong environmental reading and ecological reading to be drawn from it. Yeah, the closing lines, right? Let us think where we may have our home. Why don't you, why don't you, you know, sing us out with with the reading reading the the end of the poem. The poem moves towards I think an ecological address or at least it's the way I found myself responding to it because the urgency that we need to address the environmental situation that we find ourselves in seems to me akin to the drama. And to the dilemma and the worry and the immediacy that the seafarer does to and there is a moment where the seafarer says it is a fool who does not detect a greater calling humility is a gift grace of light is a gift. And then we are told that we must fix our compass and keep it fixed, lived with interest and moderate our ways. Now these could be religious ideas, but they could also be instructions to how to live an environmentally positive and engaged and respectful life as well. And then it finishes with a kind of challenge and a kind of invitation to us as it reaches its ultimate destination and it reads like this. Let us think where we may have our home and consider how we may reach it then strive to build a rapture that sustains inseparable from life under love's direction, hope without limit indebted to the realm in which we are raised without beginning or end. The seafarer by poet Matthew Hollis and photographer Norman McBeath was published by Hazel Press in the UK in 2024. You can read an excerpt on our website, lapimscortally.org. On the lapims quarterly substack, you'll find extracts of our back issues that compile quotations and images on such topics as intoxication, friendship and the sea. You'll also find there lists of further reading shared by some of the guests who have joined me this summer on the podcast. I'm Donovan Hone for lapimscortally. This episode of The World in Time was produced with help from Peter Ojaro. Special thanks this week to Anna Logan, Jamie Fuller, a poor Votata Polly, Lee Furlick, Jason Brown and Christo Hayes. Lapimscortally brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues, on sale now, are available for purchase on our website. Visit lapimscortally.org for more details. [BLANK_AUDIO]